Where Does Writing Curriculum Come From

Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing Carl Vandermeulen (2011) ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-437-9. Pp. xx + 229 The Creativity Market Creative Writing in the 21st Century Dominique Hecq (ed.) (2012) ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-709-7. Pp. xiv + 229 Key Issues in Creative Writing Dianne Donnelly and Graeme Harper (eds.) (2013) ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-846-9. Pp. xxvi + 182

This editorial offers a snapshot view of current trends in writing pedagogy, with the intention of raising awareness of some substantial changes taking place in methodologies, student populations, and teachers of writing. These changes, which are not revolutionary in nature but rather represent evolutionary trends, are nonetheless fairly dramatic in terms of (1) shifting the center of gravity of the field away from the United States and the teaching of writing to native speakers of English; (2) bifurcating the field into schools with different orientations to written texts and different methodologies for research and teaching; (3) disarticulating writing from reading; (4) raising issues of author identity and ownership of texts; and (5) potentially lowering the status and quality of the teaching of writing.

Olivia Archibald's essay ("Representation, Ideology, and the Form of the Essay") arguing for a turn away from the formal, Baconian essay and towards the more creative and personalized Montaignian form of writing that was the original essai, and, in the most recent issue (volume 4.1), Douglas Heil's essay ("TV Writing and the Creative Writing Workshop: Shaping Practice across Disciplinary Boundaries") arguing for a meshing of the approaches of creative writing in English departments and scriptwriting pedagogy in mass communication. The current issue brings together the perspectives of creative writers, writing teachers, and creativity scholars to offer a novel examination of creativity for writing pedagogy. In combining reflections on the nature of

This issue is focused on the importance of students writing and reading texts that incorporate their own specific experiences and identities, including as minorities or speakers of English as a second or additional language. I see this orientation as related to arguments others (e.g. Archibald, 2009) have made about the need for writing in academic contexts to be less bound to the strict conventions of the essay form, and indeed for concepts of text to be interpreted to include non-print forms. The field of academic writing, coming from both the Rhetoric and Composition side of the house and the Applied Linguistics-ESL side of the house, is increasingly consolidating a view that all students should be involved in writing themselves into their texts and, further, into the educational curriculum. This is the essential insight of the notion of identity texts which is central to this issue All of the articles in this issue derive from the influence of Professor Jim Cummins and his career-long focus on education in bilingual and multilingual contexts, academic language learning and literacy, and especially his Empowerment Framework Cummins' Featured Essay adds to the ongoing critique (including in some editorials and articles previously published in this journal) of misguided educational policy impacting learning and literacy in negative ways. He argues and advocates for approaches that will ensure literacy engagement for students from marginalized groups and backgrounds where English is not the primary language, as illustrated in each of the approaches

Like other kinds of work with a strong intellectual-reflective component, teaching is complex action. The wide range of skills and types of decisionmaking involved in this complex, high-level work classifies teachers as professionals not simply laborers As I have noted in research carried out with K-12 teachers in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, teachers have to manage a wide range of competing priorities in their work Like other teachers, writing teachers must handle a set of contrasting aims in classroom teaching, balancing the course-level and whole-class curriculum concerns of structure and predictability against the activity-level and individual-level concerns of teaching-learning process, creative response, and adaptation to circumstances and to the needs and interests of individual students. The teacher's balancing act is complicated by the need to factor in requirements and constraints imposed by administrators and governing bodies as to class size, workload, curriculum and texts, testing, grading, and record-keeping, and it is exacerbated by the extra time needed to handle the added burdens. It is further exacerbated by differences in what can be planned for in advance and what cannot and by differences in the teacher's goals, preferences, and ideals, on the one hand, and the reality of the teaching situation, on the other. Writing teachers' best-laid plans are often laid aside because of the constraints of their teaching situation, such as too-large class size or students whose linguistic or writing skills require remediation.

Given the high demands in knowledge and practice of written language conventions of academia and of specific disciplines, research traditions, and accepted approaches to thesis writing, doctoral students face a daunting array of challenges in writing a thesis. Here we discuss some ideas for automated analysis of low-level features of a thesis and preliminary work using Correspondence Analysis showing differences across chapters in theses from four fields (Biology, Linguistics, Tourism, and Film Studies) according to the presence of the three types of reporting verbs studied by Hyland (2002), i.e. those expressing research acts, cognitive acts, and discourse acts. The analysis illustrates the method and is suggestive of its potential for pointing up differences in thesis structure that might be of value for thesis students and their supervisors.

This is the inaugural issue of a journal, Writing & Pedagogy, that seeks to provide a new forum for discussion and dissemination of knowledge focused on both writing and the teaching of writing. It is innovative in being both international in scope and in spanning across all levels of education, from K-12 through doctoral level. The journal aims to provide information and stimulate conversations that can advance the theory and practice of writing pedagogy in first-and second-language environments by revealing similarities and differences in the practices and concerns regarding writing and the teaching of writing across different contexts and educational systems. The journal solicits submissions in the categories of essays, research reports, pedagogical reflections, discussions of technology, and book reviews. Although the primary focus is on the teaching of English writing within formal education, the journal welcomes articles on writing outside of English education, such as the teaching of writing in other languages, the writing needs of specific workplace contexts, and issues of a theoretical or practical nature involving the nature of writing or research on writing.